shaking and shivering for a chance to pounce and squeal and bite and tussle.
It’s like watching children at a game of keep-away, except in the end, someone eats the ball.
When I put my hand on the lever, an enormous wolf comes out of nowhere and leans heavily against the door, fur squashed against the metal mesh. He licks his paws, but the meaning is clear.
In the other direction, past the kitchen and the Alpha’s office, is a big room that I had noticed before. Lined with half-empty bookshelves, the room is occupied by a group of small children nestled together watching a man with colored and numbered tongue depressors as he tries to extract a blue stick from a boy’s teeth. “Soft mouth, Edmund,” he says. “Soft mouth.” Seeing me, he kicks the door closed with his foot.
The hall opens onto an enormous space with raw beams above broad floorboards dappled by the jade light leaking in through the trees outside. A breeze blows through the open windows, bringing the whisper of rustling leaves and tussling birds. It’s huge but not in the way of August’s cavernous cathedral ceilings and double-height windows that had nothing to do with need and everything to do with signaling that he had the money to build and heat more space than he needed.
This is huge in the way of a place that is meant to accommodate very many very large people.
The far end of the room is occupied by long, heavy tables that smell of beeswax. When we first arrived, they had been surrounded by flimsy metal chairs, but now those are all folded against one wall.
At the near end, a huge fieldstone fireplace is surrounded by a mismatched trio of worn and clawed sofas and secondhand lamps. A well-chewed shoe drops to the floor, narrowly missing my head. Above me at the top of a set of stairs, a little furry head pops out from a birch-branch balustrade. The puppy looks at me and then at the shoe and barks. I pick up the shoe. The puppy barks again. I draw back my arm and throw. With a quick flick, the head disappears, followed by a thump and the scratching of claws on wood up above.
Then Magnus screams.
Doors that had been closed now open as werewolves turn alarmed toward the room with the closed door just past the Alpha’s office.
When I crash through the door, Tristan turns toward me, his latex gloves coated in blood. Magnus’s eyes are huge above his gore-smeared face. I hear his garbled voice behind me as the doctor’s body slams into the floor, his head between my hands, until someone enters the room and gathers me up in arms like iron.
What are they doing to Magnus?
“I am trying to help him,” the doctor says, feeling the back of his head.
“Magnus,” the Alpha grunts, “tell him.”
“He can’t, Alpha. He’s got film in his mouth.”
“Get it out. While I still have him.” She holds me so tight, my shoulder blades rub together.
Trapped between her hardness and her softness, I strain when the doctor reaches into Magnus’s mouth. Magnus whimpers as Tristan pulls out a white tab covered with blood.
“That’s it, Shifter. I needed an X-ray.” He turns his laptop around, dislodging a pile of heavy stationery embossed with TRISTAN RASMUSSON, MD, FACS, which slides to the floor.
Dr. Rasmusson clucks with annoyance, stepping over the puddled pages to retrieve a damp cloth. He gives it to Magnus, signaling for him to wipe his face.
Magnus dabs weakly at his mouth, then falls back, the white paper lining the bed crackling under him as he turns on his side, the cloth to his mouth. All the fight seeps out of me.
“Alpha?” The doctor picks up his laptop, bending his head to the other side of the room, away from Magnus’s racked body.
I pull a blue cotton blanket up to cover Magnus’s distended shoulders and his swollen joints and bony vertebrae, the guilt I feel is almost nauseating. I can’t pretend this is anyone’s fault but mine.
“Shifter?” the Alpha says.
I pull the blanket up farther, less for Magnus’s sake than to hide the unpleasant truth that having promised to protect him, I had let him become this.
“Shifter?” she says again and I head numbly to where the two of them stand over a cart with shallow drawers and a small tray of metal instruments.
Balancing the laptop next to the tray, Tristan pulls up a complicated patchwork image of black and shades of gray.